I was pleased to see that the FT asked the excellent Scottish novelist and broadcaster Louise Welsh to review Doctor Forrest for this weekend’s edition of the paper, and her write-up exhibits an easily learned appreciation of some of the great works by which I was influenced, most eminently Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. That she feels I managed to do something fresh with this time-honoured material is something I’m very gratified by.
‘Overreaching scientists whose morals lag behind their professional abilities are as much a staple of gothic horror as asylums, vampirish beauties, graveyards, doppelgängers and dead people who refuse to lie down. Richard T Kelly’s The Possessions of Doctor Forrest features all of the above and more… Kelly has embraced the gothic and he gleefully acknowledges his literary forebears… There is a pleasure in anticipating how a well-known tale will play out this time and, in The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, Richard T Kelly has put his own original stamp on the genre.’
drforrest.wordpress.com 